Vibe's Views: Friday Night Flights of Fancy

(The following is a partial retrospective of our team's work on Somnipathy for LD50.)

The week leading into Ludum Dare 50 was filled with anticipation for the group here at Tearcell. We delightedly participated in the theme slaughter - can't spell slaughter without laughter! - and then speculated all through the elimination rounds. Some of our members pre-stormed some ideas based on themes that spoke to them more strongly than the others. Other preparations were made: the Github repository was made, software versions were updated or synced, tools were tested.

Then on Friday night, we gathered in a voice channel on our Discord server a bit before 9pm EST. We talked and teased and caught up with each other's lives but conversation petered out as the moment approached. The clock rolled over, and our fearless leader Cyzaine spoke into the quiet, "delay the inevitable."

This set off a burst of conversation and activity. We skimmed back through our list of pre-storm ideas and discussed them as well as our immediate impulses. But rather than give a blow-by-blow of different specific ideas I think it would be more interesting to discuss the HOW of our brainstorming process which fell broadly into two categories.

The first category of brainstorming was theme based design: what themes we liked and mechanics we envisaged for them regardless of how plausible the mechanic might be.

The second category of brainstorming was mechanic based design: what mechanics we liked and how we could shoehorn a theme into them regardless of how reasonable the connection might be.

We also established a pattern pretty early in our deliberations of switching between the two modes of thought regularly. Not only did this jar us out of dead-ends, but it let us maintain a balance between strict adherence to a theme to the exclusion of mechanics or the reverse. Finding a healthy balance is important - otherwise inevitably you'll end up with a game that has dumped all its points into a single stat!

For theme based brainstorming, we ran the gamut from the silly (attempting to hold in bodily functions – and yes, that was a fart joke!) to the serious (attempting to hold onto memories in the face of ever-encroaching Alzheimer’s disease). We took themes and moved them around within other themes (what if it was that…but in space? but with zombies?). We even tried reversing themes to see if they were still inevitable.

For mechanic based brainstorming, everything was on the table. You play by inputting tilt commands. You play with input lag. You play with indirect control of the player character. You play a visual novel. You play turn-based, you play hidden controls…you’re in a tube trying to catch things, you’re platforming trying to avoid things, there are night and day phases. All of these and more wandered through the chat.

We also identified the things that were important to us. We were determined to make sure we allocated having online leaderboards into our plan and schedule. And we wanted to make sure we were providing representation – either through a gender selection option or utilizing a female or enby player character. (As our team for this jam is 3/8ths women, that had a bit of extra internal joy for us.)

Given that a number of our team members had time limitations for how late our brainstorming session could go, we started to finalize some of the theme and mechanic pairings after about two hours of conversation.

Our initial impulses around “trying not to fall asleep” had been to look for something that was going to be more unique despite it being one of our earliest ideas discussed. What kept it in the mix was that we kept circling back to it on the mechanic side of the discussion. It was also one of the themes that had a workable inverse version – trying not to wake up – which gave it added legs in our considerations and by the time we had settled in on some of the mechanics it was a fully fleshed idea, to be jointly dreamt into existence over the next 69 hours.

So. 69 hours to go, and we had a roughed-in concept and plan. Were we confident that we would make a game? Very. Were we confident it would look like we imagined or be any good? Not as much!